Tag: the chalcedon foundation

Still Shut Down

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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The Chalcedon Foundation website (www.chalcedon.edu) is still shut down, we still don’t know what happened to it, and our tech guys are still working to try to bring us back online.

Just a couple of weeks ago some “journalist” sporting a rainbow T-shirt and a Palestinian face mask was “investigating” us for being a “hate group.” The substance of his investigation was that the Southern Poverty Law Center called us a hate group in 2006, so obviously we must be one, yatta-yatta. He complains to our server, and the next thing we know, our website is down.

Some of us have come to believe that Big Tech will do whatever it takes to ensure a Democrat presidency from whom they can buy whatever favors they need. Part of that strategy has to be to stifle conservatives, to erase their presence from the social media.

Meanwhile, Patty has solved and corrected the problem of my book chapters coming out as gibberish, so at least that one can come off Chalcedon’s to-do list.

Please pray for my employers and my mentors, The Chalcedon Foundation. Father in Heaven, we are being kept from our ministry–this is my belief–by the ungodly, who have interfered with our communications. They can’t get at you, so they come after your servants. Please, Lord, see us through this frustrating time, help us get back online, and protect us from the malice of your enemies. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

An Unusual Assignment for Me–and Maybe You Can Help

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

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Some of you know me as the contributing editor for The Chalcedon Foundation’s print magazine, Faith for All of Life. For a coming issue of the magazine, I have taken on the task of reviewing, of all things, an Agatha Christie mystery novel–Curtain, Hercule Poirot’s last case.

Christie wrote the novel during World War II and then locked it away in a bank vault, waiting until 1975 to have it published–an unusual procedure which, to my mind, has not been fully explained. Why wait 30 years to publish it?

My review will focus on a single scene in the novel: a dinner. All the characters are seated around the table, and the conversation turns to the topic of what ought to be done with–or to–people who are no longer “valuable to society”–the old, the sick, the retarded, etc. Remember that this was being written during World War II, with Britain fighting for its very life against the Third Reich.

At the table, the more forceful characters declare that people who “don’t matter anymore” ought to be disposed of, somehow. And everyone else just sort of meekly nods and mumbles “of course you’re right,” etc.

When I read that, my hair stood on end. “Whoa! Uh, folks, you’re, like, fighting for survival against the Nazis, and the Nazis, well–they stand for the very ideas that you’re bandying about and tepidly agreeing with! Why are you fighting Hitler and Himmler, and at the same time talking like them?” I was astonished.

Although the novel was written during the war–and we are told that Christie feared she might be killed in a German bombing raid or V-2 strike, which is why she stowed the book in a bank vault, just in case–its setting in time is left quite vague. There’s nothing in it to show in what year, or era, the fictional events occurred.

Why this conversation at the dinner table? Christie often drew her fictional characters from life. It seems more than likely that she had heard such conversations among people she knew, either during the war or just before it. She was writing about certain ideas that certain people, who were not Nazis, actually had. One is left wondering: can it be said that Britain really won the war, if key elements of Nazi ideology were left festering in British culture? What was happening to Britain’s Christianity?

I also wonder what other Curtain readers think of this. Tell me if you like. I’d love to know.

 

Alas for Britain

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Image result for images of cops busting lemonade stand

Obviously posed… I think

By now most of you know about the little 5-year-old girl in Britain who set up a sidewalk lemonade stand–only to have the local government go all Starsky & Hutch on her about it (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/five-old-socked-200-fine-154728017.html)

But really, things are bad in the Mother Country and have been bad for a while.

Is Britain Finished? is a magazine article I wrote for Chalcedon some ten years ago (https://chalcedon.edu/resources/articles/is-britain-finished). In it you’ll read of some extraordinary incidents.

*Babies (yes, babies) accused of being racists.

*Man stopped by police for displaying the English flag on his car–in England.

*Four full-time police officers “investigating” a 9-year-old calling another child “gay” on the playground.

I don’t know how to lift the whole article onto the blog, so to read it you’ll have to click the link. I strongly recommend reading it.

Meanwhile, let’s not get all complacent about such off-the-wall things not happening here in our country–because they are. In Our Threatened Freedoms (edited by yours truly), R.J. Rushdoony collected dozens of incidents of government at all levels going completely mad. My favorite was the news report of a little boy Out West selling fishing worms that he dug up himself–with five full-time government agents assigned to “investigate” it.

Government isn’t drunk with power.

It’s absolutely crazed with power.

Finally! ‘The Throne’

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The Throne (Bell Mountain, 9)

At last, the ninth book of my Bell Mountain series, The Throne, is on sale. There’s been some difficulty in preparing the e-book edition, but the paperback is out and you can order it straight from the publisher, at http://www.chalcedon.edu/ (click “Store,” then “Fiction”), or from amazon.com, where they don’t yet have the picture, but that will probably come today.

Shout-outs to contest winners Savannah and Heidi: Savannah, I have your address, thanks so much for your patience, and I’ll ship your autographed copy to you ASAP (I’ve just received my author’s copies). Heidi, I need your address. Email it to me at leeduigon@verizon.net .

I’ll have more to say about this letter. For now, I’ve got to hustle because I have another doctor’s appointment this morning. *sigh*

And thanks to all of you who kept at it last night and helped me get those 6,000 hits for February!

My Books Are Being Trolled

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Image result for images of cellar beneath the cellar

From time to time I like to check amazon.com to see how my books are doing.

I got a nasty surprise last night, and again this morning, when I discovered one-star ratings among my customer reviews: Bell Mountain first, and now The Cellar Beneath the Cellar. I would rather not give the name of the malicious little nit that posted them.

See if you can follow his logic. Lee Duigon is “a follower” of R. J. Rushdoony. [I am employed, and my books are published, by The Chalcedon Foundation, the ministry founded by Rushdoony. I am not aware of being “a follower” of anyone.] Rushdoony was “a religious huckster” [no, he wasn’t] and “a christofascist,” whatever that is. Therefore, “persons of good character” will avoid my books.

Having read thousands of pages of Rushdoony’s published works, I can truly say this person is talking through his hat. But because Rushdoony was a faithful man of God, libs and other louses have always attacked him viciously.

Thing is, I have few reviews, not many readers know that I exist: so a single one-star rating easily drives down a book’s overall rating. By the time this insect gets around to trolling the later books in my series, it will look like half the readers hated them.

That “christofascist” tag is genuinely offensive. In all probability, the reviewer is some left-wing loon from the Southern Poverty Loon Center, or someplace like that, who thinks everybody to the right of where he is, out on the far-left fringe of the galaxy, is a fascist, a knotsy, and a biggit who should be beaten senseless, etc. That’s the Loving Left all over.

All right, well, I’ve taken one for the team. An inner voice keeps whispering, “It’s about time they’ve come after you! I was beginning to think you were doing something wrong.”

But my books are my babies, and when somebody maliciously attacks them, I do admit I find it hard to laugh it off. It’s a lesson I’d better learn, I guess. I don’t want God to be ashamed of me for yelping about a bug-bite.

Here’s the Webinar! ‘Thoughts on Being a Writer’

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

Wow, here it is already–the “webinar” I did just the other day, organized, moderated, and edited by Andrea Schwartz, my esteemed colleague at The Chalcedon Foundation. She is amazingly efficient.

So here it is, if you can stand listening to my voice for 55 minutes (I’m not sure I can). (  https://thekingdomdrivenfamily.com/2016/10/26/thoughts-on-being-a-writer-webinar-discussion-with-lee-duigon/ )

It was a lot of fun being questioned by people who had actually read my books: in fact, it was the first time that’s happened. I hope the advice I gave these kids and teens was good advice.

thethrone

Busy, Busy, Busy!

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’m going to be mighty busy today. My esteemed colleague at the Chalcedon Foundation, Andrea Schwartz, has organized a webinar with me as the perfesser–young people from all over the country who want to be writers, who are going to ask me all about writing. The questions will be live, and I won’t get to see them in advance, so who knows what they’ll spring on me?

I’ve got to hustle now and get the decks cleared for this. You know, the one question I never fail to hear–I mean, if I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times, literally–is “How long does it take you to write a book?” Well, that depends on whether you’re writing Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or something in between.

So, if you’re new to this blog and are looking for something to read, today would be a good day to browse the archives–’cause I don’t know how long the webinar will take. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

Keep the Komments Klean, Please

Posted By: leeduigon(patty)Posted On:

I’m always happy to publish reader comments on this blog. After all, it suggests that people are reading it. But I received a couple last night that just couldn’t be allowed to see the light of day.

Just for future reference, here are some of the guidelines, again.

1. Look, I’m from New Jersey, where folks throw f-bombs around like confetti. But this is a Christian blog and there are no cuss-words allowed.

There are a lot of angry people out there, and there is a lot to be angry about. But anger must be kept under control. We really can’t have people jumping up and down, screaming, cursing, and making extravagant threats.

Come to think of it, I’m kind of prejudiced against that all-caps stuff, too.

2. A comment really must not include threats of physical violence. True, they can’t easily be carried out over the Internet. But they do indicate a state of mind not entirely appropriate to the occasion.

3. Do not pretend to be making a comment just so you can try to sell me something.

4. As much as I am against “hate speech” laws and pseudo-laws–that’s one of the things that cheese me off–I don’t permit terms of abuse. Use of those terms may indicate that you really, truly, do hate someone, and wish to do them harm, solely on the basic of some external characteristic (like skin color, for instance). I am not inclined to publish such language. This is a Christian blog, part of the Chalcedon Foundation’s ministry, and I have a responsibility to keep it that way. As it is, some readers think I go too far. But I do try not to.

So, by all means, let’s have comments–the more the merrier. All you gotta do is scroll down and click “Leave a reply.” I publish at least 90% of what I get.

In Memorium: Sam Blumenfeld

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A great champion of literacy and homeschooling has died.

Sam Blumenfeld (1927-June 1, 2015) worked tirelessly for decades to expose the fraud of public education and to pioneer home education. He labored to restore the practice of learning how to read by first learning phonics and the alphabet–a method vastly superior to the “word recognition” bushwa taught in many public schools.

I never had the privilege of meeting Sam, but I did help edit one of his books, Revolution via Education. Sam wrote many books on the history of education and on reading, including The Victims of Dick and Jane, Alpha-Phonics: A Primer for Beginning Readers, The Alpha-Phonics Readers, and How to Tutor, just to name a few. All of his books are available from The Chalcedon Foundation ( http://www.chalcedon.edu–just click “Store” and “Books”). While I’m at it, I must also recommend R.J. Rushdoony’s The Messianic Character of American Education–in which the creators and developers of public education reveal and condemn themselves in their own published words.

When Sam began crusading for home education, it was virtually illegal in most states. Now homeschooling is the fastest-growing form of education in America, no small thanks to him.

As a member of the Chalcedon family, I share in its mission to reform education by taking it out of the hands of teacher unions and the government and restoring it to families and churches where it belongs. The shortcomings and abuses of public education are too numerous to mention here (see, for instance, yesterday’s post, http://leeduigon.com/2015/06/04/public-school-assignment-find-mom-and-dads-sex-toys/ ). But Sam set us all an example of undaunted perseverance.

We know, as he knew, that the single greatest boon to America would be the end of public education. The rest of us will carry on where Sam left off.